Recent advances in plant genetic engineering have opened new doors to engineer plants to have improved characteristics or traits. These transgenic plants characteristically have recombinant DNA constructs in their genome that have a protein-coding region operably linked to at least one regulatory region, e.g., a promoter. Novel strategies need to be developed for transgene expression that provide for precise spatiotemporal control. Conventional approaches to the regulation of plant transgene expression by the fusing of a highly expressed promoter element directly with the protein-coding sequence have proved insufficient to meet the stringent safety and technical demands of plant biotechnology today. Commercially the exploitation of plants by transgenic modification is hampered by the inability to introduce and coordinately regulate multiple transgenes in transgenic crops. One conventional approach involves fusing each biosynthetic protein-coding sequence to a common promoter element, followed by repeated transformation into a transgenic plant. This approach is time-consuming, limits further alterations of transgene expression and rather than enabling coordinate transgene expression can lead to cosuppression of transgenes. Also, multiple copies of the same promoter, directing coordinate regulation of multiple genes, can lead to gene inactivation through repeat-induced gene silencing (Ye and Signer, 1996, Proc. National Acad. Sci. 93:10881-10886) or other means of gene silencing. A second limitation is that the pattern of expression conferred by the particular promoter employed is inflexible in that the same promoter-dependent pattern of expression is conferred from generation to generation. For imparting certain traits, it is desirable to have the ability to regulate the trait-conferring transgene expression differently in successive generations. A two component transcription factor/target promoter system could be used to address the above limitations of transgene expression with existing promoters. Many positive transcriptional regulatory factors are modular, consisting of a DNA-binding domain and transactivation domain that interacts with components of the transcriptional machinery assembling at the promoter (Ptashne, M. (1988) Nature. October 20; 335(6192):683-9.). Fusing combinations of these elements, derived from different kingdoms, results in production of diverse hybrid factors having defined DNA-binding specificity and transcriptional activation function (Moore et al. (2006) Plant J. 45:651-683; Weinmann et al (1994) Plant J 5(4):559-569; U.S. Pat. No. 7,285,416, U.S. Pat. No. 6,252,136, U.S. Pat. No. 6,576,422)